You may have woken up today thinking it was just another Thursday, that is, until you checked Google’s homepage and saw an interesting animation replacing the normal Google logo.

Google is known for celebrating and honoring special holidays, occasions, and important dates in history with its “Google Doodle.” The company even has a patent on the doodle. Today Google celebrates the 200th birthday of German chemist Robert Bunsen with an interactive doodle.

Google’s doodles aren’t always interactive, so your Thursday just got that much better. When you mouse over the Bunsen burner, the water above it heats up. The colorful, bubbling liquids in flasks, a distillation column, test tubes, taps, and the burner make up the word “Google.”

Bunsen’s achievements in science went farther than inventing the Bunsen burner that we all learned to use in middle-school science class. According to his Wikipedia page, the chemist’s work led to the discovery of new elements, caesium in 1860 and rubidium in 1861; and an antidote for arsenic poisoning, among other things. He also developed several gas-analytical methods, was a pioneer in photochemistry, and did early work in the organoarsenic chemistry field.

Bunsen earned a Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1831, making him an official doctor, and making the Muppet’s Dr. Bunsen Honeydew character partially correct. In 1833 Bunsen began experimental studies of the “(in)solubility” of metal salts of arsenous acid. To this day, Bunsen’s discovery of the use of iron oxide hydrate as a precipitating agent is still the best-known antidote against arsenic poisoning.

In 1836, Bunsen studied cacodyl derivatives, which is extremely toxic and undergoes spontaneous combustion in dry air. Bunsen almost died from arsenic poisoning, and he almost lost his sight in his right eye after an cacodyl explosion.

He’s most famous for investigating emission spectra of heated elements, which led to the invention of the Bunsen burner. In 1855, he developed this with his lab assistant Peter Desaga (perhaps the Beaker to his Bunsen?). The team wanted to improve the laboratory burners then in use., and the new design provided a very hot and clean flame.

Bunsen was born, interestingly enough, on March 30 1811. Google’s one day late, but we’ll forgive them. Bunsen was said to have always conducted himself as a perfect gentleman, and he preferred to work quietly in his lab. Also, on a point of principle, Bunsen never took out a patent, even though he could have made a fair amount of money from the burner and a battery he had invented.

Reader Comments

FreeYourMind

“In 1936, Bunsen studied cacodyl derivatives”
You pick on google for being a day late on the birthday. Yet you can’t even get the date right in this article you wrote for when Bunsen completed specific works. I’m sure he was long dead by 1936.

PS – your crappy comment system now also freaks out if you try to post a second comment in anything less than 5 minutes!